Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Regeneration, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Masculinity, Expectations, and Psychological Health
War, Duty, and Loyalty
Male Relationships
Trauma and Mental Illness
Alienation vs. Belonging
Summary
Analysis
Prior is sitting before the examination board, determining whether he is fit to go to France. Watching his nervous antics, Rivers realizes that although Prior wants to return to France, some part of him also wants to be rejected, to survive, and he pities the young man. Outside in the waiting room, Sassoon sits impatiently. The board is over an hour behind schedule and he has a dinner appointment he wants to keep, so he spontaneously leaves. When Rivers goes to get Sassoon for his examination, he realizes that Sassoon has disappeared.
Prior’s split desire to return to war and to be discharged from service represents his inner conflict between wanting to conform to society’s standards of an ideal man and simply wanting to survive. That Prior’s desire to do his duty and be a masculine man carries with it the possibility of death suggests that the pressure society places upon men to fit a masculine stereotype is so great that it can even outweigh one’s desire to live.
Themes
After several more examinations—none of them Sassoon’s—Rivers visits Prior in his room. The young man’s swollen eyes indicate that he’s been crying. Prior is bitter and ashamed; he is being discharged, not for his psychological condition but on account of his asthma. Rivers tries to convince him not to feel ashamed of getting the chance to live, but he also understands that being denied combat wounds Prior’s socially-instilled sense of masculinity, which, though stupid, Rivers himself would likely feel the same about. Prior mentions that his mother always tried to hold him back as a child as well, and figures that is why he never saw Rivers as “daddy” like some patients did; he turned him into his mother instead. Even so, Rivers tells Prior he’d love it if Prior visited with him after the war, and Prior promises to write.
Again, the shame that Prior feels over being denied the chance to conform to society’s ideal of a masculine man suggests that fitting into that norm, being accepted by society in that way, might even mean more to him than life itself. This seems insane behavior, but Rivers admits that he feels it just the same, demonstrating the enormous pressure that society exerts on men to live up to its own masculine ideal. Despite their antagonism and frustration, Prior and Rivers’s intention to keep in touch suggests that each man respects and admires the other at the end of it all.
Themes
Rivers, eating dinner with the other officers, is restless. He worries that Sassoon has actually deserted, in which case he will be asked to help certify Sassoon as insane. There are too many casualties by now for the government to allow an actual protest of the war or any real debate. Late in the evening, Sassoon enters Rivers’s office, looking “sheepish.” Rivers is furious, and Sassoon admits he was being “petulant[t].” He still wants to go back to combat, but wants a second opinion from a psychiatrist in London, so that in case he does resume his protest, the authorities will have a harder time arguing that he’s relapsed into insanity.
It is significant that even Rivers, who started as dutiful supporter of the war, recognizes that the government will not allow open debate on the war’s merits or ethics. This suggests that government corruption, or at least its suppression of dissenting voices, is clear enough even to citizens who are not a part of the military’s operating force. This depiction is quite dark, making the government seem an authoritarian force rather than a democratic institution.
Themes
